The Lost Crown (18 page)

Once everything and everyone is aboard, the trains plod slowly east with the blinds tightly drawn by order of the Provisional Government. Olga and I close our eyes and grip each other’s hands until we must be outside the borders of the city. Neither of us moves or says a word, but even without looking I know from the way she kneads her fingers against mine that Olga is praying too.

By the time we are well into the countryside, I have to admit that we are comfortable enough after all, in spite of having to share a single carriage. We read and embroider to help pass the time or to keep from wondering where we are going. All we know is that the trains are pointed east, bearing placards that read,
JAPANESE RED CROSS MISSION
. How I wish we were truly on a Red Cross mission! The thought of working in a hospital again is almost too much to hope for; anyway, the signs are only to keep the trains from drawing attention.

We always used to travel with two trains, both of them painted dark blue and emblazoned with double-headed imperial eagles between each window. One was a decoy, and I always felt sorry for the people who lined the railroad tracks in hopes of catching a glimpse of us, only to greet the empty carriages instead. Now it is just the opposite. We are our own decoy with our placards and Japanese flags. At every station, the blinds have to be drawn and no one is allowed to look out. Nevertheless, at one stop, Anastasia peeks out of the curtains.

“Get away from there,” I tell her.

“Don’t be so bossy. The soldiers don’t care, so why should you? Besides, there’s no station. I can just see a tiny house.”

A little voice calls from outside, “Uncle, please give me a newspaper if you have one.” I set down the Bible and leave Mama’s side. Below the window, a boy looks earnestly up at Anastasia.

“I am not an uncle but an auntie, and I don’t have a newspaper,” Anastasia says, solemn as a nun. Outside on the platform, the soldiers chuckle. “What are they laughing at?” she demands. “And why did that boy call me ‘uncle’?”

Pretending to think, I scratch my own prickly scalp.

Anastasia slaps her forehead. “I forgot. I look like a hedgehog without my hat on, don’t I?” Even Mama and Papa laugh at that.

After three days we reach Tyumen, a Siberian town east of the Ural Mountains, and at midnight board a steamer called
Rus
to begin twisting our way east again, first up the Tura River, then the Tobol.

Two days upstream, the steamer gets stuck in a sandbar. Mama has been in her cabin all day with her heart drops and rose-leaf cushion, so I get permission from Colonel Kobylinsky for Aleksei and me to go out along the riverbank and gather flowers for her. By the time he calls us back on board, Mama has appeared on deck. With a tender smile she cradles our bouquet in one arm and encircles Aleksei’s shoulders with the other.

“Do you know where we are, darlings?” For the first time in months, she looks serene. Her hand rests gently at the back of Aleksei’s neck, and her eyes shine as though she has just taken Holy Communion. I look out across the river. In the distance, slanted barn roofs jut toward the spire of a church. “This is Pokrovskoe,” Mama says. “Father Grigori’s home. He said we would see it ourselves one day.”

Pokrovskoe. A shiver swoops out from my spine and along my ribs. “Praise be to God,” I whisper as I cross myself. Olga silently takes one of the wildflowers from Mama’s bouquet to press into the pages of her diary. Even in death,
Otets
Grigori brings us comfort. If we had gone to the Crimea, we might never have seen it.

Two days more and we reach the city of Tobolsk, where the steamer finally anchors. From the dock, the city’s white-walled kremlin seems to kneel on the embankment above the river. Bells ring out over the riverbanks as Colonel Kobylinsky directs the men to begin unloading our luggage.

“Are the bells ringing for us?” Anastasia asks.

“Of course not. It is the Feast of the Divine Transfiguration,” I say, even though the gathering townspeople are already beginning to gawk at us, just as they did at home. Why is everyone suddenly so dumbfounded at the sight of us? Do they think we should be wearing the imperial regalia everywhere we go? If they only knew how many loose gem-stones Mama has secretly stowed into our luggage, their jaws would drop even further.

While Colonel Kobylinsky goes ahead to see about our lodgings, I try to keep Mama from becoming flustered with all the staring; I do not think the splotches on her cheeks are from the heat. Before I can think what to do for her, Papa begins to talk soothingly about the town. “I visited Tobolsk twenty-six years ago, on my way home from my tour of the Far East. The stone kremlin is three hundred years old,” he tells us, “but the first wooden walls were built in the fifteen hundreds. There are ancient kurgan tombs from the tenth century before Christ. It is a beautiful old city, Alix,” he says, stroking Mama’s hand.

“I would like to see the relic of St. John of Tobolsk,” Mama concedes. I think she would kiss Papa if no one were watching.

“Do you think we’ll be allowed to visit the churches, Papa?” Olga asks.

I look over the kremlin wall at the sky blue cathedral domes with their gold crosses flashing in the sun, and my heart dares to thrill.

“I certainly hope so,” Papa answers. A tiny smile cracks Olga’s face, just enough for me to see the gap between her front teeth.

“I wonder if there is a hospital here?” Being able to work as a nurse again would be such a blessing.

“Mashka wants to know if there’s a candy shop,” Anastasia declares, but before Papa can answer either of us the colonel comes back, looking disgusted.

“My apologies, Your Majesties, but the governor’s house is not prepared.”

Not prepared? We seven gape at one another like the townspeople. We have traveled for days on end over thousands of miles, and the house where we are to stay is not ready for us?

“It’s dingy and unpleasant inside, Your Majesty. The paint and wallpaper are peeling, and there is virtually no furniture.”

The younger ones burst out laughing. Mama and I speak at the same time. “No furniture!”

“Is this what we should expect from the new government— disrespect and disorder? It’s an embarrassment.”

Colonel Kobylinsky turns pink as a filet of salmon and mops his brow as he apologizes to Mama once again. “Poor man,” Olga murmurs.

God help him. Mama is rarely easy to please, but the colonel is stranded between us and the Provisional Government, and three regiments of soldiers, too. How can he possibly satisfy everyone?

“When I was a young man,” Papa says, “I stayed in that very house on my return trip. We will be comfortable here,” he assures us. But for another full week, we must live on board the
Rus
while the house is cleaned, decorated, and furnished.

Our aimless cruise drifts dully by: Mama spends most of the long, hot days in her cabin. Maria catches a summer cold. Joy kills a poisonous snake.

“It feels like we are nowhere at all, only drifting along the border between two places,” I tell Olga and Anastasia up on deck one afternoon.

“Like the River Styx,” Olga says.

“Huh?” Anastasia grunts.

“The ancient Greeks believed the River Styx was the boundary between earth and the underworld,” Olga explains. “When someone died, a coin was placed in his mouth to pay the ferryman Charon to guide his soul across the river.”

My stomach always feels as if it has been lined with lead when Olga talks this way. I can never be sure when she is putting more meaning behind her words than the story they tell. With nothing to say myself, I watch Anastasia and Olga look across to the Siberian bank of the Tobol. Their thoughts are murky as the river to me.

“Open your mouth,” Anastasia says suddenly. “You too, Tatya.” She peers at us like our dentist Kotstrisky, then smirks. “That explains it—not a kopek in there. It’s all your fault, both of you.”

“Oh, Shvybs!” One side of Olga’s mouth curves up like a festoon of lace, and she swats at Anastasia. Watching my sisters like this swings my heart between melancholy and gratitude.

“I’m going to tease Mashka and Aleksei, too,” Anastasia says, and off she dashes to the cabins.

With the deck to ourselves, I take my turn to gaze over the rail. “Remember how different it was four years ago?”

Olga nods and covers my hand with hers. I do not even have to explain. What a year 1913 was. As part of the twelve-month celebration of three centuries of our family’s rule, we seven spent a week cruising down the Volga on board the steamship
Mezhen
. Our carpets, furniture, and paintings from home furnished the vessel. When we cast off, bell towers rang out and peasants sang “God Save the Tsar” and “Down the Mother Volga” in the torchlight. Their cheers rocked the entire boat. All along the riverbanks that whole week long, crowds of them waded over their waists in the water to get near Papa. Some even fell to their knees and kissed his shadow as we steamed by.
Slava Bogu
, no one could tell from the shore that Aleksei’s leg was still too bent from his hemorrhage at Spala to walk. When we reached Kostroma, a public holiday had been declared. Cannons boomed and the bells in the town’s kremlin pealed overhead. The entire city gleamed with paint and polish.

“It was like arriving in heaven itself,” Olga says, as if she has been watching the scenes inside my mind this whole time.

I close my eyes to return to my memories, but the images blur and dissolve into the tears trapped under my eyelids.

22.

OLGA NIKOLAEVNA

August-September 1917
Tobolsk

F
or the length of the walk from the dock to the governor’s house, my arms and legs tingle as if someone has poured a bottle of fermented mint
kvass
through my veins. Even the soldiers marching alongside us can’t stop the little bubbles of cheer from rising up in me at being able to stride ahead without a boundary in sight. I jostle along the wooden sidewalks with the Little Pair, remembering the rare thrill we used to feel at being part of the bustle of a town on our holidays in Sweden or Germany, and feeling sorry for Tatiana, who follows by motor with Mama.

The signpost on our street, freshly repainted
FREEDOM STREET
, makes my heart stumble for a moment, but watching the people along the sidewalks take off their hats and cross themselves as we pass smoothes my nerves.

Far too soon, the governor’s house rises up in front of us like a block of snow bounded by a sharp picket fence.

“What a snug, sturdy-looking place! Is this a big house, Papa?” Maria wants to know.

I’m glad Maria asked instead of me. The soldiers can snort all they like at our ignorance, but except for Anya’s dear cottage in Tsarskoe Selo, what do my sisters and I know about houses?

“It is. In fact, it’s a mansion,” Papa corrects her.

It’s likely the largest house in Tobolsk, and just looking at it makes me feel cramped. Extravagance never seemed like part of my life before, but now shame curls my toes until the gun in my boot pinches against my ankle.

“If we live here now, where will the governor stay?” Sweetheart Mashka, always thinking of everyone but herself.

“Where will the servants stay?” Anastasia interrupts. “This place could fit inside the courtyard of our palace back home.”

My cheeks flare. What must the soldiers think, listening to us balk? “Hush, you two! We haven’t even seen the inside.”

Papa is right—the house is comfortable enough. On the ground floor, every space but the dining room gets divided up for bedrooms and filled with our best servants as neatly as the compartments in Mama’s traveling jewelry chest. Dr. Botkin’s family and the rest of our people will have to board across the street in the Kornilov house, or take rooms in town.

Right away, Papa hangs his chin-up bar upstairs in the front corner study while we convert the ballroom next door into a chapel with one of Mama’s handmade bedcovers on the altar.

“What about services?” Mama wants to know. “We cannot celebrate the full
Obednya
service without a consecrated altar. We must go to church in town for
Obednya
.”

Colonel Kobylinsky dodges the question. “For now I will arrange for nuns and a priest to celebrate
Obednitsa
.” Only the abbreviated service without Communion? My spirits droop. “And of course there will be no objections to daily prayer services without clergy.”

The ballroom opens into Mama’s sitting room, which we sisters arrange before Mama sets foot in it. Tatiana directs while the Little Pair and I put Mama’s own crocheted coverlet on the sofa, and her favorite portraits of Papa, Aleksei, and ourselves on the walls and tabletops.

Next to that comes Papa and Mama’s bedroom, and finally the adjoining corner room my sisters and I share. “Four big windows,” Mashka says, cheerful as a canary in a new cage. “One for each of us.” Aleksei will sleep in the pink room just across the hall, with his
dyadka
bunking in an adjoining scrap of space not much larger than a closet.

Together, my sisters and I fix our bedroom as much like home as we can. We line up our nightstands and striped camp cots along two walls as snugly as books on a shelf—any one of us can lie in bed and reach across the space between to hold hands with our neighboring sister. At the foot of our cots we each place a white wooden chair to drape our clothes over at night, just like always. Icons and identical portraits of
Otets
Grigori watch over us from our nightstands. For furniture we have only a couch and a single writing table to share, but Maria is right—it’s cozy with all four of us together.